Overview

The new novel by the author of the acclaimed Regeneration trilogy.

Suppose time can slow down. Suppose it's not an ever rolling stream, but something altogether more viscous and unpredictable, like blood. Suppose it coagulates around terrible events, clots them over, stops the flow . . .

During the hazy Newcastle summer, Nick's grandfather Geordie lies dying. A proud and resilient man, he has long outlived his peers but not the memories of his ...

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This Book

Overview

The new novel by the author of the acclaimed Regeneration trilogy.

Suppose time can slow down. Suppose it's not an ever rolling stream, but something altogether more viscous and unpredictable, like blood. Suppose it coagulates around terrible events, clots them over, stops the flow . . .

During the hazy Newcastle summer, Nick's grandfather Geordie lies dying. A proud and resilient man, he has long outlived his peers but not the memories of his youth. As Nick watches, Geordie starts to relive the horrors that surrounded his brother's death in the painful days before his own.

Meanwhile, at Lob's Hill, on the other side of the city, Nick and his pregnant wife, Fran, are failing to keep the peace in their increasingly fractious home. In an attempt to unite the family, Fran organizes the children into decorating the living room. As the old wallpaper is peeled away, a vigorous and obscene drawing of an Edwardian family is revealed. The portrait it reveals is the history of their home, casting a terrifying shadow over the family.

Another World is an extraordinarily powerful study of memory, and of the various ways in which the violent past returns to haunt and distort the present.

What People Are Saying

Alida Becker

[An] eye for the delicate, often puzzling balance of human strength and weakness, both physical and mental, has been at the core of Barker's work from the beginning....Clearly, Barker wants us to think about how the combat of (and with) the past is mirrored in the domestic skirmishes of the present — to consider...:the power of old wounds to leak into the present."
— Interview in The New York Times Book Review, May 16, 1999

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
A good novel draws readers into a situation in which they have an emotional stake in the characters and their story. Through this personal connection, readers have an opportunity to learn about themselves and possibly about the larger world. A great novel, on the other hand, one like Pat Barker's eighth novel, Another World , achieves this while mysteriously shadowing reality with such haunting detail and clarity of vision that "conjuring" seems a more appropriate word for the process than mere "writing." Another World is packed with chilling millennial insight, whether it be into the current media celebration of centenarians, the specter of a ground war in Europe, our revisiting of past wars in recent films such as Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, or the mass murder of students by students at Columbine High School.

Pat Barker hasn't always been the grande dame of English literature. While her first four books were generously reviewed in America, they were all but ignored at home. From Durham, England, an old cathedral town where, she jokes, crime is the chief industry, Barker says, "My work explores the English class system, and I was, and still am to an extent, read through distorted glasses because of it. If you're writing about people who left school at 15 and haven't got much money, well, this surely isn't a worthy subject for literature. But Americans aren't so hung up about such nonsense." Labeled a gritty, working-class, feminist writer, Barker, in a sense, had written herself into a corner. "The natural instinct is to talk yourselfoutof something like this," she says, "but the real truth is that you have to write your way out of it, which takes some time." And as the general tenor of her work slowly began to change, so did the attention in England.

Today, Barker's reputation rests on her massive exploration of the fallout of war, the acclaimed Regeneration trilogy — the concluding volume of which won England's most esteemed literary award, the Booker Prize. In each of these three immensely moving and impeccably researched historical novels ( Regerneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road), Barker explores the psychological aftermath of fighting in the trenches of World War I. In Another World , she returns to the First World War, but this time through Geordie, a 101-year-old veteran eking out the last months of his seen-it-all, done-it-all life. Barker grew up with men like Geordie, so this was a natural direction for her. She says, "My grandfather suffered a bayonet wound in the First World War; my stepfather came home with permanent lung damage because he was gassed in the trenches at 15; my father disappeared in the Second World War; and my uncle came home shell-shocked, a very different man from the one who left in 1939. It's quite easy to see how I became interested in the continuing cost of war, the idea that the trail of psychiatric casualties mount over time."

Nick is Geordie's grandson. He and his second wife, Fran, have recently relocated to the old Fanshawe house in Lob's Hill. Their family is a blend of previous marriages. Jasper is the youngest, Gareth is in the middle, and Miranda (visiting Nick's family for the summer because her mother has been carted off to the asylum), is at 13, the oldest. Fran is also pregnant. This new home was supposed to be a new beginning for them all, especially for Fran, who admits, "I just don't like what I've turned into." But the house, which carries the secret of an oddly foreshadowing murder almost a century before, ultimately destroys such hopes.

At this point the story forks. Nick's stepson Gareth is increasingly becoming a problem. His penchant for evil advances from a rather harmless, although disgusting, swipe of Nick's toothbrush around the rim of a toilet bowl to an attack on Jasper that nearly takes his life. Standing above his brother on a mountain cliff, Gareth hurls a stone that connects, gashing Jasper's head. Barker says she "was interested in the question of whether not it is a uniquely disturbed child who kills or are there other children every bit as disturbed who do not go on to kill." Through Gareth, Barker is saying that the actual business of killing another child happens almost accidentally, as if for some reason all the cards are unluckily aligned on that particular day at that particular time. In the case of Gareth, the only reason Jasper does not die is because the stone is too small.

While Fran and Nick's family life at home is falling apart, Nick must spend his nights taking care of Geordie. Although convinced that he's dying from a bayonet wound suffered more than 80 years ago, Geordie's real nemesis is cancer. "I am in hell," Geordie confesses to Nick between painkillers and nightmares. The war has been torturing him again, especially the memory of his brother Harry, who never made it home. Barker's unflinching portrayal of Geordie's mental and physical decay is gritty, honest, and powerful. The final chapters seamlessly, if not shockingly, weave the story together on several different fronts. And in doing so, Another World announces that while the world may be on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium, and a new beginning, the past is always close behind.

— Nelson Taylor

Ruth Rendell

This old-fashioned novel in a modern idiom remains one of the best things she has ever done, surely the most moving.
— The Sunday Times(London)

Nan Goldberg

It was William Faulkner who said, "The past isn't over. It isn't even past." Now Pat Barker says it again in Another World, her first novel since her great World War I trilogy, "Regeneration." She says it literally ("Geordie's past isn't over. It isn't even the past"), without even crediting Faulkner, which is kind of cheeky. But she also demonstrates it, using her characters to drive the point home.

Nick, her protagonist, is entrapped in the past in numerous ways. In his second marriage, to Fran, he is dealing with the consequences of his and Fran's first marriages, each of which produced one child: Fran's son, Gareth, who lives with them and is showing signs of being seriously disturbed; and Nick's daughter, Miranda, who as the story begins is coming to stay with them indefinitely. The house the family has just moved into soon reveals itself, through a mural uncovered while stripping wallpaper, to have been the site of another family's tragedy and possibly of a horrific crime. Finally, Nick loves and feels responsible for his dying grandfather, Geordie, who brought him up.

Another World would seem to be a radical shift of focus from "Regeneration," but there is a World War I connection: Geordie insists he is dying not of cancer but of the bayonet wound he suffered in that war. Hounded by some awful memory, he is thrown back onto the battlefield in his dreams every night. When he confesses to having killed his own brother during a battle, Nick is sure his grandfather has become delusional, and yet he can't help wondering if it might be true.

These three main elements — Nick's second marriage and all its complicated step-relationships; the sordid, secret history (complete with ghosts) of Nick's new home; and the dying Geordie and his confession — all illustrate Barker's point, but they are otherwise unconnected except through Nick. Unfortunately, that isn't always enough. Early on, for instance, Nick decides not to divulge the story of the house's previous occupants to his family. Eventually it fades away, a lost narrative thread that has never quite worked its way into the fabric of the plot.

Barker's strength, as usual, is in her perfectly calibrated dialogue, as here, in a conversation Gareth initiates with Miranda:

"Are you going to be here all summer?"

"I don't know."

"Mum doesn't want you here."

"That's all right, I don't want to be here."

"So why are you?"

"My mother's ill. She's in hospital."

"What sort of ill?"

"Depression."

Gareth hesitates, unaware of his ground.

"You don't go into hospital with that."

"That's all you know."

"She's mad."

"She isn't."

"She's in the bin."

"Hospital," Miranda repeats steadily.

Barker's work is always interesting, and this novel is no exception. Each of the parallel stories is absorbing, and most of the characters — particularly Nick, Geordie and the children — are skillfully drawn. Still, some overriding connection seems missing, and in the end, the book is smaller than the sum of its parts.
— Salon

New Criterion

...[A] resounding testimony to the breadth and durability of her fictional powers....[W]ritten with all the suspense of a thriller....Pat Barker is capable of getting across a powerful message with the absolute minimum of rhetoric...

Michiko Kakutani

[T]he very real virtues of the novel...[are] Ms. Barker's nuanced depiction of her characters' interior lives, her unsentimental rendering of their daily travails and her finely calibrated delineation of the workings of memory....[It is] a novel, one hopes, that will win this talented writer a wider audience in the United States and send readers back to her earlier work.
—New York Times

From The Critics

...[A] haunting...portrait of an England trying to escape its past....[G]othic trappings are laid out as a mere backdrop to the real horror going on in people's heads...

Publishers Weekly

The author of the award-winning Regeneration trilogy has changed publishers and time frames for her newest book, but the result is as spellbinding as ever: thoughtful, acutely observed and profoundly moving. Geordie, a WWI veteran, is over 100, but is hanging on to life with the same stubbornness and iconoclasm that have seen him through the entire 20th century. His grandson, Nick, living in grim, contemporary Newcastle-on-Tyne, is struggling with his own life as he monitors Geordie's last days. Nick's teenage daughter from a previous marriage, Miranda, has come to stay; his new wife, Fran, with her own kid, Gareth, a computer games freak, has two-year-old Jasper to contend with and another baby on the way. Now it seems that their new house may be haunted by the kind of malign domestic spirit at large among Nick's little family. Geordie, too, has his own ghosts — a hideous war memory, long buried, that must be exorcised before he can die in peace. Barker mixes brilliantly observed contemporary realism (the strains of family life with children of different ages have seldom been so powerfully rendered) and mystical overtones with dazzling skill. The book has the grip of a superior thriller while introducing, with no sense of strain, a sense of sorrowful mortality that lingers long after the last page. Geordie is a masterly creation, one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction.

Library Journal

Having first won literary acclaim for her gritty depictions of contemporary English working-class life in such novels as Union Street (1982), Barker then moved into historical fiction with her Regeneration trilogy, set during World War I; the final volume, The Ghost Road (LJ 2/15/96), won the 1995 Booker Prize. Now in the haunting Another World, she effectively combines the past with the present. Its a hot summer in the industrial city of Newcastle, and Nick is struggling to care for his ailing centenarian grandfather Geordie while coping with growing tensions in his own blended family. Theres the visiting Miranda, Nicks teenage daughter from a previous marriage; resentful stepson Gareth; and Nicks pregnant wife, Fran, exhausted and angry from having to deal with two-year-old Jasper and the other kids without Nicks help. When the family uncovers beneath the wallpaper of their living room a pornographic portrait of the houses original Victorian owners and Nick discovers that a child may have been murdered there, a malevolent spirit is released among them. At the same time, the dying Geordie relives his brothers death during World War I. Barkers ambiguous use of supernatural elements makes this a suspenseful read, but the books real power lies in her vividly drawn characters, from the guilt-ridden Geordie to Gareth, a lonely little boy made hateful by the knowledge that he is unloved and unwanted.
 Wilda Willams

Michiko Kakutani

[T]he very real virtues of the novel...[are] Ms. Barker's nuanced depiction of her characters' interior lives, her unsentimental rendering of their daily travails and her finely calibrated delineation of the workings of memory....[It is] a novel, one hopes, that will win this talented writer a wider audience in the United States and send readers back to her earlier work.
— The New York Times

Barry Unsworth

The story is told in a terse and vivid present tense....The novel exerts its grip early and, as the strands of its plot come together, past and present show their similarly poisonous fangs....There is a good deal of compassion in Barker's book, but not a lot of hope....a powerful and moving and deeply humane study of the tyranny of the past and the quandaries of the present.
— The New York Times Book Review

The New Criterion

...[A] resounding testimony to the breadth and durability of her fictional powers....[W]ritten with all the suspense of a thriller....Pat Barker is capable of getting across a powerful message with the absolute minimum of rhetoric...

Gabriele Annan

Starting on a novel by Pat Barker is like boardinga ship. Her urge to say what she has to say throbs like an engine through the narrative, which is peopled by instantly visible characters: bizarre, appealing, pathetic, sometimes menacing. She is unexperimental and unpretentious, a born storyteller but serious...
— The New York Review of Books

Bukowski

...[A] suspenseful, sorrowful novel.
— The Wall Street Journal

Kirkus Reviews

"Ambivalent relationships" among an embattled extended family whose confusions are mirrored and reshaped by the past are the intriguing matter of this eighth by the Booker-winning British author of, most recently, the Regeneration trilogy.

From the Publisher

"Another World demonstrates the extraordinary immediacy and vigor of expression we have come to expect from Barker . . . A powerful and moving and deeply humane study of the tyranny of the past and the quandaries of the present."—Barry Unsworth, The New York Times Book Review

"[Pat Barker] is the natural successor to George Orwell, like him a keen and passionate defender of humiliated children, foot soldiers and what's become of the British working class."—Newsday

"One of Pat Barker's gifts is her mix of compassion and bleak realism . . . Barker's confidence as a stripped-down, elegant stylist is evenly matched by her moral depth."—The Boston Sunday Globe

"Barker is capable of getting across a powerful message with the absolute minimum of rhetoric, one of the rarest gifts a writer can be blessed with. The surface simplicity of her method conceals, then slowly reveals, a narrative with all the richness and complexity of a symphony."—The New Criterion

"This old-fashioned novel in a modern idiom remains one of the best things she has ever done, surely the most moving." —Ruth Rendell, author of Harm Done

"[Barker's] remarkable visits to the past help replenish the emptying containers of memory by substituting storytelling for forgetting. With her novels, she adds dignity to this century's often bleak and undignified human record." —The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Barker's writing is brilliant; the thoughtful, inventively composed sentences are a joy to read."

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

More by this Author

Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1943. She was educated at the London School of Economics and has been a teacher of history and politics. Her books include the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, comprising Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, which won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize. Pat Barker is married and lives in Durham.

Biography

It took Pat Barker ten years to find a publisher for her first novel, but when Union Street was released in 1982, critical reaction was extremely positive. A gritty tale set in the 1970s, the book recounts the interconnected stories of seven women living in an industrial town in northern England. Barker, a former teacher of history and politics, was recognized as a formidable, if late-blooming talent. In its review, The New York Times mused, "Pat Barker gives the sense of a writer who has enormous power that she has scarcely had to tap to write a first-rate first novel." The literati agreed. The following year, Barker appeared on Granta magazine's list of the 20 Best Young British Novelists alongside such future luminaries as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan.

Although Barker received critical praise for her early books, tales that limned the bleak lives of working class Britons, she struck her most resonant chord with the Regeneration Trilogy, a series of novels based on the experiences of shell-shocked WWI soldiers (including poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen) at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland. The first novel in the trilogy, the splendid Regeneration, was named by The New York Times as one of the four best books of 1991; its sequel, The Eye in the Door, won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1993; and the concluding novel, The Ghost Road, was awarded the 1995 Booker Prize for Fiction.

Certainly, Barker has explored the nuances of contemporary civilian life in subsequent novels; but the specter of war, especially the Great War, seems always to loom over her writing. One explanation is that the grandfather who raised her fought in the trenches in France. Although he seldom spoke about the war, it came to haunt him in his later life. Even unvoiced, his wartime experiences became part of her childhood "stock of memories."

Read an Excerpt

The questions, discussion topics, and suggested reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Pat Barker’s Another World. We hope they will help focus and direct your discussion of this gripping tale of past and present, memory and loss, by the acclaimed author of the Regeneration trilogy.

During a hazy Newcastle summer, Nick and his pregnant wife, Fran, are battling to keep the peace in their unhappy household. Fran’s eleven-year-old son, Gareth, is showing increasing signs of rage and distress; Nick’s adolescent daughter, Miranda, is cool and affectless. Both are visibly hostile to two-year-old Jasper, their half brother. As the situation begins to slip out of control, the family discovers under the old living-room wallpaper a group portrait of the Fanshawes, who lived in their house, Lob’s Hill, some ninety years earlier. Hate-filled, obscene, deeply disturbing, the portrait reveals the state of the modern family’s own hearts, and casts a terrifying shadow over their lives.

Meanwhile, Nick’s centenarian grandfather, Geordie, lies dying in his home nearby, cared for by Nick and his aunt. As Geordie’s health deteriorates, he becomes more and more mired in the past, obsessively reliving his years in the trenches in the World War I and the violent death met there by his brother, Harry. As events at Lob’s Hill unfold, Nick begins to learn the secrets his grandfather has so long kept buried, and simultaneously to comprehend the reasons for his own family’s misery. He learns the bitter lesson that old wounds can leak insistently into the present, and that tragic events often play out for many years. Powerful, harrowing, and finally cathartic, Another World proves, once again, that Pat Barker is one of the finest novelists of her generation.

First Chapter

Chapter One

Cars queue bumper to bumper, edge forward, stop, edge forward again. Resting his bare arm along the open window, Nick drums his fingers. The Bigg Market on a Friday night. Litter of chip cartons, crushed lager cans, a gang of lads with stubble heads and tattooed arms looking for trouble — and this is early, it hasn't got going yet. Two girls stroll past, one wearing a thin, almost transparent white cotton dress. At every stride her nipples show, dark circles beneath the cloth, fish rising. One of the lads calls her name: `Julie!' She turns, and the two of them fall into each other's arms.

Nick watches, pretending not to.

What is love's highest aim?
Four buttocks on a stem.

Can't remember who said that — some poor sod made cynical by thwarted lust. Nothing wrong with the aim, as far as Nick can see — just doesn't seem much hope of achieving it any more. And neither will these two, or not yet. The boy's mates crowd round, grab him by the belt, haul him off her. `Jackie-no-balls,' the other girl jeers. The boy thrusts his pelvis forward, makes wanking movements with his fist.

Lights still red. Oh, come on. He's going to be late, and he doesn't want to leave Miranda waiting at the station. This is the first visit to the new house. Fran wanted to put it off, but then Barbara went into hospital and that settled it. Miranda had to come, and probably for the whole summer. Well, he was pleased, anyway.

The lights change, only to change back to red just as he reaches the crossing. Should be easier in the new house — more space. In the flat Gareth's constant sniping at Miranda was starting to get on everybody's nerves. And Miranda never hit back, which always made him want to strangle Gareth, and then it was shouts, tears banged doors: `You're not my father ...' So who was? he wanted to ask. Never did, of course.

Green — thank God. But now there's a gang of lads crossing, snarled round two little buggers who've chosen this moment to start a fight. His fist hits the horn. When that doesn't work he leans out of the window, yells, `Fuck off out of it, will you?'

No response. He revs the engine, lets the car slide forward till it's just nudging the backs of their thighs. Shaved heads swivel towards him. Barely time to get the window up before the whole pack closes in, hands with whitening fingertips pressed against the glass, banging on the bonnet, a glimpse of a furred yellow tongue, spit trapped in bubbles between bared teeth, noses squashed against the glass. Then, like a blanker of flies, they lift off him, not one by one, all at the same time, drifting across the road, indifferent now, too good-tempered, too sober to want to bother with him. One lad lingers, spoiling for a fight. `Leave it, Trev,' Nick hears. `Stupid old fart int worth it.'

He twists round, sees a line of honking cars, yells, `Not my fucking fault!' then, realizing they can't hear him, jabs two fingers in the air. Turns to face the front. Jesus, the lights are back to red.

By the time he reaches the station he's twenty minutes late. Leaving the car in the short-stay car-park, he runs to the platform, only to find it deserted. He stands, staring down the curve of closed doors, while a fear he knows to be irrational begins to nibble at his belly. A few months ago a fourteen-year-old girl was thrown from a train by some yob who hadn't got anywhere when he tried to chat her up. Miranda's thirteen. This is all rubbish, he knows that. But then, like everybody else, he lives in the shadow of monstrosities. Peter Sutcliffe's bearded face, the number plate of a house in Cromwell Street, three figures smudged on a video surveillance screen, an older boy talking a toddler by the hand while his companion strides ahead, eager for the atrocity to come.

Think. Hot day, long journey, she'll fancy a coke, but when he looks into the café he can't see her. The place is crowded, disgruntled bundles sipping orange tea from thick cups, shifting suitcases grudgingly aside as he edges between the tables. A smell of hot bodies, bloom of sweat on pale skins, like the sheen on rotten meat, God what a place. And then he sees her, where he should have known all along she would be, waiting sensibly beneath the clock, her legs longer and thinner than he remembers, shoulders hunched to hide the budding breasts. She looks awkward, gawky, Miranda who's never awkward, whose every movement is poised and controlled. He wants to rush up and kiss her, but stops himself, knowing this is a moment he'll remember as long as he's capable of remembering anything.

Then she catches sight of him, her face is transformed, for a few seconds she looks like the old Miranda. Only her kiss isn't the boisterous hug of even two months ago, but a grown-up peck delivered across the divide of her consciously hollowed chest.

Feeling ridiculously hurt, he picks up her suitcase, puts his other arm around her shoulder, and leads her to the car.

Fran becomes aware that Gareth has come into the room behind her. He moves quietly, and his eyes wince behind his glasses, no more than an exaggerated blink, but it tweaks her nerves, says: You're a lousy mother. Perhaps I am, she thinks. She's failed, at any rate, in what seems to be a woman's chief duty to her son: to equip him with a father who's more than a bipedal sperm bank. Of course she has supplied Nick, but he's bugger-all use. Fantastic with other people's problem kids, bloody useless with his own.

She's tired of the guilt, fed up to the back teeth with attributing every nervous tic, every piece of bad behaviour, every failed exam to the one crucial omission. Nobody knows. Suppose it wasn't the absence of a father, suppose it was the presence of two mothers? God knows her mother would sink anybody. And the alternative — which it suited everybody to forget — was the North Sea or the incinerator or whatever the bloody hell they did. And he'd come within a hair's breadth — literally — of that. Lying on the bed, already shaved, when she decided she couldn't go through with it. She started to cry, the gynaecologist hugged her — and later sent her a bill for 150 quid. Must've been the most expensive hug in history. And then she got up, walked down the long gleaming corridor, and out into the open air. She stood outside the phone box for half an hour, a cold wind blowing up her fanny, before plucking up the courage to ring Mark at work. Put on hold for five minutes, she fed ten pees she couldn't afford into the box, and listened to the theme song from Dr Zhivago. When Mark finally came on the line, he said, `I knew you wouldn't go through with it.' Typical. Mark had to be in control, had to know what other people were going to do before they did. Later, in bed, he said, `Fran, there's no need to worry. I'll marry you. I said I would and I will.' `You needn't,' she said, pressing her hand over the place where the baby was. And he didn't. Gone before the hair grew back.

`Gareth, what do you want?'

Gareth's thinking how ugly she looks, with her great big bulge sticking out. He wonders what the baby looks like. Is it a proper baby with eyes and things or is it just a blob? He'd watched a brill video at Digger's house, when his mam and Teddy were still in bed. A woman gave birth to a maggot because her boyfriend had turned into a fly or something like that, he never really got the hang of it because Digger kept fast-forwarding to the good bits. And the maggot was all squashy when it came out, and they kept looking at each other to see who'd be the first to barf but nobody did.

`What are you staring at?' Fran asks sharply.

`Nothing.'

`Have you done your homework?'

`Yeah.'

`What was it?'

`When's she coming?'

"`She's" the cat's grandmother.'

`When's Miranda coming?'

A glance at the clock. `They should be here now. What did you have to do?'

`The Great Fire of London.'

`I thought you'd done that.'

`Not with Miss Bailes. Why is she?'

`Why is she coming?' Fran hears herself repeat in a Joyce Grenfell comic-nanny sort of voice — she can't believe it's coming out of her mouth; this is what having kids does to you — `Because it's her home.'

A derisory click of the tongue. Gareth edges closer, scuffing his sleeve along the table. In a moment he's going to touch her and, God forgive her, she doesn't want him to.

`What's wrong with Barbara?'

Fran opens her mouth to insist on some more respectful way of referring to Barbara, then closes it again. How is a child supposed to refer to its stepfather's first wife? `Auntie' Barbara sounds silly. And `Mrs Halford', though technically correct, doesn't sound right either. `She's ill.'

`What sort of ill?'

Fran shrugs. `Ill enough to be in hospital.'

`How long's she coming for?'

`Six weeks.'

`Shit.'

Yes, Fran thinks. Shit. `I hope you're going to make more of an effort this time, Gareth. You don't have to play together—'

`We don't "play".'

True, Fran thinks. Gareth's obsession with zapping billions of aliens to oblivion hardly seems to count as play. `You'll have to be here to meet her when she comes, but —'

`Why?'

`Because I say so.'

He reaches her at last, rests his hand on her shoulder for a second while she sits motionless, enduring the contact. After a while the small warm thing is lifted off her and he goes away.

Reading Group Guide

These discussion questions are intended to enhance your group's reading of Pat Barker's Another World. We hope they will help focus and direct your discussion of this gripping tale of past and present, memory and loss, by the acclaimed author of the Regeneration trilogy.

During a hazy Newcastle summer, Nick and his pregnant wife, Fran, are battling to keep the peace in their unhappy household. Fran's eleven-year-old son, Gareth, is showing increasing signs of rage and distress; Nick's adolescent daughter, Miranda, is cool and affectless. Both are visibly hostile to two-year-old Jasper, their half brother. As the situation begins to slip out of control, the family discovers under the old living-room wallpaper a group portrait of the Fanshawes, who lived in their house, Lob's Hill, some ninety years earlier. Hate-filled, obscene, deeply disturbing, the portrait reveals the state of the modern family's own hearts, and casts a terrifying shadow over their lives.

Meanwhile, Nick's centenarian grandfather, Geordie, lies dying in his home nearby, cared for by Nick and his aunt. As Geordie's health deteriorates, he becomes more and more mired in the past, obsessively reliving his years in the trenches in the World War I and the violent death met there by his brother, Harry. As events at Lob's Hill unfold, Nick begins to learn the secrets his grandfather has so long kept buried, and simultaneously to comprehend the reasons for his own family's misery. He learns the bitter lesson that old wounds can leak into the present, and that tragic events often play out for many years. Powerful, harrowing, and finally cathartic, Another World proves, once again, that Pat Barker is one of the finest novelists of her generation.

Discussion Questions:

1. Pat Barker has chosen a quotation from Joseph Brodsky as her epigraph: "Remember: the past won't fit into memory without something left over; it must have a future." What is the significance of this sentence for the novel?

2. Fran ascribes Gareth's emotional problems to the fact that he has no father. Does this seem an adequate explanation, or do you think that something is fundamentally awry in the relationship between Gareth and Fran herself? Why does Fran resist his touch on p. 8? Has Gareth in any sense been rejected by his mother in favor of Jasper, or Nick? Would you call Gareth's behavior abnormal, or is he simply going through a bad spell?

3. "Suppose time can slow down. Suppose it's not an ever rolling stream, but something altogether more viscous and unpredictable, like blood. Suppose it coagulates around terrible events, clots over them, stops the flow..." (pp. 270-71). At what points in the novel are we aware of the past actually coexisting with the present? Which of the characters, aside from Geordie, is still reliving the past? How have the landscape and character of Newcastle itself been molded and shaped by the events of World War I?

4. Looking at Fran on arriving home after a difficult day at work, Nick is "repelled by her" (p. 32). Does Barker imply, over the course of the book, that such moments of physical revulsion are a normal part of marriage and even of love? Can marriage and love survive these feelings?

5. When the portrait of the Fanshawe family is finally revealed, Miranda says "It's us" (p. 41). In what ways do the Fanshawes, as portrayed by the painter, indeed resemble the new owners of Lob's Hill? How do the two families differ? Is the analogy Miranda instinctively draws indeed, as Nick concludes at the end, a false one?

6. Geordie frequently calls Nick "son," and even Frieda occasionally slips and refers to Geordie, when speaking to Nick, as his father. Why has Nick developed this intense filial bond with Geordie rather than with his own father? Has his rather remote relationship with his own parents affected Nick's way of relating to and communicating with his children, stepson, and wife?

7. Nick resisted making a visit to the French battlefields for years, only agreeing to go when it became evident that Geordie would soon be too feeble to travel. Then "something important happened to Nick at Thiepval and he'd never come to terms with it" (p. 74). What happened to Nick at Thiepval, and how has it changed his emotional life and his feelings toward his grandfather? Does he "come to terms with it" during the course of the novel?

8. Is the mysterious girl that Nick, Gareth, and Miranda see in fact a ghost? What effect does she have on each of them? If she is a ghost, why has she decided to manifest herself to them? If not, why do they think they see her?

9. I thought we'd been conned, love," Geordie says to Helen, talking about the war. "I knew we'd been conned" (p. 155). Who conned the soldiers, and what was the lie that was told? Is such conning an inevitable element of warfare, or was it especially evident in World War I?

10. Nick accuses Fran of driving away men, including himself, by using Gareth as an excuse (p. 206). Do you think he has a point?

11. Another World could be said to be a novel about hatred between siblings. Does the novel imply that such hatred is inevitable? How much of it derives from jealousy? From the feeling that one or both parents favor one sibling?

About the Author:

Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees, England, in 1943 and grew up in Teeside. She was educated at the London School of Economics, and has been a teacher of history and politics. Her 1982 novel, Union Street, richly evoked the working-class life of her Teeside childhood; it was awarded the Fawcett Society Book Prize and was adapted as the American film Iris and Stanley. Barker's highly-regarded Regeneration Trilogy (1991-96) dealt with the tragedies and horrors of World War I: its second volume, The Eye in the Door, won the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize, and its third, The Ghost Road, was the 1996 Booker Prize winner. Pat Barker lives in Durham, England, with her husband.

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